Share your memories of growing up. What are your favorite heirlooms? The antique toys you played with, the vintage dishes you ate on, the chores you did, the movies you watched, the car your parent's had, etc.

Thursday, February 02, 2012

Guardian Service Ware, Served Everyone Well

Guardian Service Ware - The Best Cookware Ever Made

Here is a wonderful memory, I love tender memories that involve cooking. I have many fond memories of time spent in the kitchen with my granny.

The post was about memories of Christmas cookies, and read in part:
I got thinking and remembering about my mother's Christmas cooking siege and my mind
wandered around the subject a bit. In that wandering around time, I remembered how
my mother stored her cookies. She stored them in Guardian Ware cookware.

Guardian
Ware (or Guardian Service Cookware) was manufactured by the Century Metalcraft
Corporation, Los Angeles, California, between 1935 and 1956. The cookware was not
sold in stores. An individual would host a party at his or her house, and a salesman
would cook the party guests a meal with the cookware. It so happened that Man's
father sold the cookware at one time. He would do the shopping for the food,
prepare, cook and serve the meal. Man's mother pulled clean up duty.
Now, back to the cookies.

My mother would make those double sugar rolled pecan
balls. They have many different names. She would buy whole pecans and grind them up
in a meat type grinder that you attached to the counter top. She baked a LOT of
these balls. A LOT! She must have started baking right after Thanksgiving. I cannot
imagine how many batches she baked. Since they also have butter and crisco in them,
and all those pecans, they can spoil. She would fill the Guardian (in fact, several
pieces of Guardian) with pecan balls. Between the layers she placed waxed paper,
this would keep the powered sugar from clumping together.

Now, here was the secret to keeping the cookies fresh for several weeks. She would
place the Guardian Ware full of those beautiful delicious round pecan balls with two
coats of powdered sugar on the stairway to the attic. Unheated attic. In Michigan in
December, in the stairwell of an unheated attic, they stayed fresh.

location: Country
state_lived_in: Michigan

Please share your fond cooking memories with us. You can post them in the comments section and I will then transfer them to the main page. If you can link to a photo please do so and I will post that too.